Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-26 Thread Steve Poe
Tom,
Honestly, you've got me. It was either comment from Tom Lane or Josh 
that the os is caching the results (I may not be using the right terms 
here), so I thought it the database is dropped and recreated, I would 
see less of a skew (or variation) in the results. Someone which to comment?

Steve Poe
Thomas F.O'Connell wrote:
Considering the default vacuuming behavior, why would this be?
-tfo
--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your iâ„¢
http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005
On Apr 25, 2005, at 12:18 PM, Steve Poe wrote:
Tom,
Just a quick thought: after each run/sample of pgbench, I drop the 
database and recreate it. When I don't my results become more skewed.

Steve Poe


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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-25 Thread Thomas F . O'Connell
Considering the default vacuuming behavior, why would this be?
-tfo
--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™
http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005
On Apr 25, 2005, at 12:18 PM, Steve Poe wrote:
Tom,
Just a quick thought: after each run/sample of pgbench, I drop the 
database and recreate it. When I don't my results become more skewed.

Steve Poe
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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-25 Thread Steve Poe
Tom,
Just a quick thought: after each run/sample of pgbench, I drop the 
database and recreate it. When I don't my results become more skewed.

Steve Poe
Thomas F.O'Connell wrote:
Interesting. I should've included standard deviation in my pgbench 
iteration patch. Maybe I'll go back and do that.

I was seeing oscillation across the majority of iterations in the 25 
clients/1000 transaction runs on both database versions.

I've got my box specs and configuration files posted. If you see 
anything obvious about the tuning parameters that should be tweaked, 
please let me know.

Thanks for the feedback!
-tfo
--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your iâ„¢
http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005
On Apr 25, 2005, at 1:58 AM, Steve Poe wrote:
>There was some interesting oscillation behavior in both version of 
postgres that occurred with 25 >clients and 1000 transactions at a 
scaling factor of 100. This was repeatable with the distribution 
>version of pgbench run iteratively from the command line. I'm not 
sure how to explain this.

Tom,
When you see these oscillations, do they occur after so many 
generated results? Some oscillation is normal, in my opinion, from 
10-15% of the performance is noise-related.

The key is to tune the server that you either 1) minimize the 
oscillation and/or 2)increase your overall performance above the 
10-15% baseline, and 3) find out what the mean and standard deviation 
between all your results.

If your results are within that range, this maybe "normal". I 
follow-up with you later on what I do.

Steve Poe



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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-25 Thread Thomas F . O'Connell
Interesting. I should've included standard deviation in my pgbench 
iteration patch. Maybe I'll go back and do that.

I was seeing oscillation across the majority of iterations in the 25 
clients/1000 transaction runs on both database versions.

I've got my box specs and configuration files posted. If you see 
anything obvious about the tuning parameters that should be tweaked, 
please let me know.

Thanks for the feedback!
-tfo
--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™
http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005
On Apr 25, 2005, at 1:58 AM, Steve Poe wrote:
>There was some interesting oscillation behavior in both version of 
postgres that occurred with 25 >clients and 1000 transactions at a 
scaling factor of 100. This was repeatable with the distribution 
>version of pgbench run iteratively from the command line. I'm not 
sure how to explain this.

Tom,
When you see these oscillations, do they occur after so many generated 
results? Some oscillation is normal, in my opinion, from 10-15% of the 
performance is noise-related.

The key is to tune the server that you either 1) minimize the 
oscillation and/or 2)increase your overall performance above the 
10-15% baseline, and 3) find out what the mean and standard deviation 
between all your results.

If your results are within that range, this maybe "normal". I 
follow-up with you later on what I do.

Steve Poe

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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-25 Thread Steve Poe
>There was some interesting oscillation behavior in both version of 
postgres that occurred with 25 >clients and 1000 transactions at a 
scaling factor of 100. This was repeatable with the distribution 
>version of pgbench run iteratively from the command line. I'm not sure 
how to explain this.

Tom,
When you see these oscillations, do they occur after so many generated 
results? Some oscillation is normal, in my opinion, from 10-15% of the 
performance is noise-related.

The key is to tune the server that you either 1) minimize the 
oscillation and/or 2)increase your overall performance above the 10-15% 
baseline, and 3) find out what the mean and standard deviation between 
all your results.

If your results are within that range, this maybe "normal". I follow-up 
with you later on what I do.

Steve Poe

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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-23 Thread Thomas F . O'Connell
Steve,
Per your and Tom's recommendations, I significantly increased the 
number of transactions used for testing. See my last post.

The database will have pretty heavy mixed use, i.e., both reads and 
writes.

I performed 32 iterations per scenario this go-round.
I'll look into OSDB for further benchmarking. Thanks for the tip.
Since pgbench is part of the postgres distribution and I had it at hand 
and it seems to be somewhat widely referenced, I figured I go ahead and 
post preliminary results from it.

-tfo
--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™
http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005
On Apr 15, 2005, at 4:24 PM, Steve Poe wrote:
Tom,
People's opinions on pgbench may vary, so take what I say with a grain 
of salt. Here are my thoughts:

1) Test with no less than 200 transactions per client. I've heard with 
less than this, your results will vary too much with the direction of 
the wind blowing. A high enough value will help rule out some "noise" 
factor. If I am wrong, please let me know.

2) How is the database going to  be used?  What percentage will be 
read/write if you had to guess? Pgbench is like a TPC-B with will help 
guage the potential throughput of your tps. However, it may not stress 
the server enough to help you make key performance changes. However, 
benchmarks are like statistics...full of lies .

3) Run not just a couple pgbench runs, but *many* (I do between 20-40 
runs) so you can rule out noise and guage improvement on median 
results.

4) Find something that you test OLTP-type transactions. I used OSDB 
since it is simple to implement and use. Although OSDL's OLTP testing 
will closer to reality.

Steve Poe

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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-23 Thread Thomas F . O'Connell
Okay. I updated my benchmark page with new numbers, which are the 
result of extensive pgbench usage over this past week. In fact, I 
modified pgbench (for both of the latest version of postgres) to be 
able to accept multiple iterations as an argument and report the 
results of each iteration as well as a summary of mean tps at the end. 
The modifications of the source are included on the new page, and I'd 
be happy to submit them as patches if this seems like useful 
functionality to the developers and the community. I find it nicer to 
have pgbench be the authoritative source of iterative results rather 
than a wrapper script, but it'd be nice to have an extra set of eyes 
guarantee that I've included in the loop everything that ought to be 
there.

A couple of notes:
* There was some interesting oscillation behavior in both version of 
postgres that occurred with 25 clients and 1000 transactions at a 
scaling factor of 100. This was repeatable with the distribution 
version of pgbench run iteratively from the command line. I'm not sure 
how to explain this.

* I'm not really sure why the single client run at 1000 transactions 
seemed so much slower than all successive iterations, including single 
client with 1 transactions at a scaling factor of 100. It's 
possible that I should be concerned about how throughput was so much 
higher for 1 transactions.

Anyway, the code changes, the configuration details, and the results 
are all posted here:

http://www.sitening.com/pgbench.html
Once again, I'd be curious to get feedback from developers and the 
community about the results, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

-tfo
--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™
http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005
On Apr 15, 2005, at 4:23 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
"Thomas F.O'Connell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
http://www.sitening.com/pgbench.html
You need to run *many* more transactions than that to get pgbench
numbers that aren't mostly noise.  In my experience 1000 transactions
per client is a rock-bottom minimum to get repeatable numbers; 1 
per
is better.

Also, in any run where #clients >= scaling factor, what you're 
measuring
is primarily contention to update the "branches" rows.  Which is not
necessarily a bad thing to check, but it's generally not the most
interesting performance domain (if your app is like that you need to
redesign the app...)

To me, it looks like basic transactional performance is modestly
improved at 8.0 across a variety of metrics.
That's what I would expect --- we usually do some performance work in
every release cycle, but there was not a huge amount of it for 8.0.
However, these numbers don't prove much either way.
			regards, tom lane

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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-15 Thread Steve Poe
Tom,
People's opinions on pgbench may vary, so take what I say with a grain 
of salt. Here are my thoughts:

1) Test with no less than 200 transactions per client. I've heard with 
less than this, your results will vary too much with the direction of 
the wind blowing. A high enough value will help rule out some "noise" 
factor. If I am wrong, please let me know.

2) How is the database going to  be used?  What percentage will be 
read/write if you had to guess? Pgbench is like a TPC-B with will help 
guage the potential throughput of your tps. However, it may not stress 
the server enough to help you make key performance changes. However, 
benchmarks are like statistics...full of lies .

3) Run not just a couple pgbench runs, but *many* (I do between 20-40 
runs) so you can rule out noise and guage improvement on median results.

4) Find something that you test OLTP-type transactions. I used OSDB 
since it is simple to implement and use. Although OSDL's OLTP testing 
will closer to reality.

Steve Poe
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Re: [PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-15 Thread Tom Lane
"Thomas F.O'Connell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> http://www.sitening.com/pgbench.html

You need to run *many* more transactions than that to get pgbench
numbers that aren't mostly noise.  In my experience 1000 transactions
per client is a rock-bottom minimum to get repeatable numbers; 1 per
is better.

Also, in any run where #clients >= scaling factor, what you're measuring
is primarily contention to update the "branches" rows.  Which is not
necessarily a bad thing to check, but it's generally not the most
interesting performance domain (if your app is like that you need to
redesign the app...)

> To me, it looks like basic transactional performance is modestly 
> improved at 8.0 across a variety of metrics.

That's what I would expect --- we usually do some performance work in
every release cycle, but there was not a huge amount of it for 8.0.

However, these numbers don't prove much either way.

regards, tom lane

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[PERFORM] pgbench Comparison of 7.4.7 to 8.0.2

2005-04-15 Thread Thomas F . O'Connell
I'm in the fortunate position of having a newly built database server 
that's pre-production. I'm about to run it through the ringer with some 
simulations of business data and logic, but I wanted to post the 
results of some preliminary pgbench marking.

http://www.sitening.com/pgbench.html
To me, it looks like basic transactional performance is modestly 
improved at 8.0 across a variety of metrics. I think this bodes well 
for more realistic loads, but I'll be curious to see the results of 
some of the simulations.

I've still got a little bit of preparatory time with this box, so I can 
continue to do some experimentation.

I'd be curious to see whether these numbers meet developer expectations 
and to see whether the developer and user community have insight into 
other pgbench options that would be useful to see.

Thanks!
-tfo
--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™
http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005
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